Tribunal 1: UCSF
November 11, 2024: People’s Tribunal Proceedings
November 12, 2024: Rally and Teach-Ins
We charge the aforementioned UC leaders, in addition to University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) leaders, including Chancellor Sam Hawgood, Executive Vice-Chancellor Catherine R. Lucey, President and Chief Executive Officer Suresh Gunasekaran, and the UCSF Foundation Board of Directors, with complicity in the genocide of the Palestinian people and the ongoing Nakba. As the only UC campus wholly focused on health, healthcare, and health professions education, UCSF has a particular ethical responsibility to uphold the sacred healthcare worker oath to “Do No Harm” and to protect humanity. In this time of genocide and ongoing Nakba, UCSF administrative leaders have failed to carry out UCSF’s stated mission to “advanc[e] health worldwide” and to honor the Hippocratic mandate that forms the cornerstone of the health professions. Far from abstaining from harm, they have colluded in imperialist violence.
Research and lived experience substantiate the direct connection between past and current settler colonialism, racism, and imperialism, on the one hand, and the health of communities most impacted by these structures, on the other. The reciprocity between Indigenous land and peoples is foundational to the health of humanity and our planet. While encouraging the UCSF community to perform land acknowledgments, UCSF, as a land grant institution that profited from genocide on this land, denies landback to the Ramaytush Ohlone people and is complicit with the murder of Indigenous people and ecocide in Palestine.
The UCSF administration upholds Zionism, a white supremacist ideology, and perpetrates anti-Palestinian racism, locally and globally. Attacks on healthcare workers, the healthcare system, and health professions students and faculty in Palestine are a key tactic that Israel, funded by the United States and supported by the UC, uses to commit genocide and ongoing Nakba. In a moment when Israel has murdered over a thousand of our Palestinian healthcare colleagues, imprisoned and tortured hundreds more, and decimated all hospitals and the healthcare system and health professions schools in Gaza, UCSF leaders have attacked and endangered those who decry this violence.
We charge UCSF and its leadership, including Chancellor Hawgood, with direct and indirect complicity in the crimes of ongoing Nakba and genocide. UCSF administration complicity includes, but is not limited to, the following crimes:
Violation of Sacred Healthcare Oath: UCSF leadership has violated our healthcare worker oath to serve humanity and its own UCSF Physician Declaration by failing to decry genocide, the murder and torture of healthcare workers, and the destruction of the healthcare and health professions educations systems in Palestine.
Persecution and Repression: UCSF leaders have collaborated with Zionist politicians and institutions to attack the free speech and academic freedom of UCSF students, staff, and faculty who have sought to fulfill their oath, including through defamatory campaigns and the suspension and firing of those who have spoken up for freedom for Palestine.
Withholding of Medical Assistance: The UCSF administration, which provides material and technical assistance to countries and regions with public health and healthcare crises, has withheld such aid to Palestinians who are suffering the impacts of climate catastrophe, mass starvation, the spread of infectious diseases, severe trauma, and other health calamities consequent to the genocide..
Investments: By investing in the Israeli state and complicit Israeli corporations, and procuring medications, equipment, and services from Israeli and other companies complicit in the violation of Palestinian rights, UCSF aids and abets the Israeli occupation and genocide.
Academic Ties. UCSF sustains Israeli occupation and ongoing Nakba through its institutional collaborations with complicit Israeli universities while refusing parallel investment in Palestinian institutions.
Institutional Zionism and Anti-Palestinian Racism: UCSF has consistently falsely equated criticism of Israel and/or Zionism with antisemitism, a practice that endangers Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, anti-Zionist Jews, and ultimately, all marginalized and oppressed communities while declining to investigate complaints of anti-Palestinian racism, doxxing, harassment, and death threats.
Donor Influence: UCSF administration has accepted $1.15 billion dollars from the Diller Family Foundation, an explicitly Zionist foundation that funds right-wing extremist hate groups, including Canary Mission-–which has doxxed UCSF faculty and students–-and programs designed to deepen collaborations with complicit Israeli institutions.
Tribunal 2: Southern California
UC Campuses
May 9, 2025: Workshops and Teach-Ins
May 10, 2025: People’s Tribunal Proceedings
The People of the UC
v.
UC President Michael Drake, UC Regent Maria Anguiano, UC Regent Elaine E. Batchlor, UC Regent Carmen Chu, UC Regent Michael Cohen, UC Regent Gareth Elliott, UC Regent Howard Guber, UC Regent Jose M. Hernandez, UC Regent Nancy Lee, UC Regent Richard Leib, UC Regent Hadi Makarechian, UC Regent Ana Matosantos, UC Regent Lark Park, UC Regent John A. Pérez, UC Regent Robert Myers, UC Regent Janet Reilly, UC Regent Mark Robinson, UC Regent Gregory Sarris, UC Regent Richard Sherman, UC Regent Jonathan Sures, Governor and UC Regent ex-officio Gavin Newsom, UC Regent ex-officio Eleni Kounalakis, UC Regent ex-officio Robert Rivas, UC Regent ex-officio Tony Thurmond
Given the failure of our leadership to respond to the urgency of these dangerous times, we–as faculty, staff, and students at the University of California (UC) alongside concerned community members–must undertake the task of confronting the complicity of our institution in an ongoing, U.S.-facilitated genocide as well as in Israel’s longstanding settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and system of apartheid in Palestine. Incapable of holding itself accountable, UC leadership has instead unleashed violence and oppression against its own workers and students who seek justice for Palestine, a future for the Palestinian people, and a world free from imperialist aggression. We have therefore gathered as a people’s tribunal to charge the University of California and its leadership– including UC President Michael Drake, the UC Regents, and Governor Gavin Newsom–with complicity in the crimes of genocide and ongoing Nakba (“catastrophe”).
From the outset, Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza has represented a textbook and clear-cut case of genocide under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Building on the work of legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah, we acknowledge that existing international law, while applicable to aspects of this deeply rooted, unabating Zionist violence, is insufficient to capture it in its totality and has been used to confine the liberatory ambitions of the Palestinian people. Nakba, as an emerging legal doctrine, encompasses not only the violent expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians in 1948, but also the ongoing processes of dislocation, fragmentation, destruction, and extermination that seek to complete the work of erasing the existence of the Palestinian people. Under the conditions imposed by Israel, Palestinians are denied their right to exist and their ability to reproduce themselves as a people. The violence of genocide and ongoing Nakba includes ecocide, the intentional destruction of Palestinian lands and ecosystems, and scholasticide, the targeting and destruction of Palestinian educational institutions and their students, faculty, and staff. Nakba, as a legal concept, thus connects the current genocide in Gaza to a larger history of Palestinian erasure while identifying Zionism, itself an outgrowth of European antisemitism and colonialism, as the foundational and driving political ideology behind the Nakba.
We charge the leadership of the University of California, which has long benefitted from its occupation of stolen Indigenous lands and centrality to the military-industrial-academic complex, with both direct and indirect complicity in the crimes of ongoing Nakba and genocide. The scope of these crimes extends beyond historic Palestine to other arenas that have been targeted by the imperialist war machine and transformed into sites of warfare and counterinsurgency.
UC leadership complicity includes, but is not limited to, the following crimes:
Conspiracy of Silence. While the University of California claims to be a national and global leader in higher education, healthcare, and sustainability, UC leadership has remained silent in the face of Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide, including the murder of children, families, scholars, teachers, journalists, and humanitarian and healthcare workers. As schools, libraries, and every university and hospital in Gaza are bombed, UC leadership has fortified the ivory tower, refusing to acknowledge, much less address its own complicity in an ongoing, livestreamed genocide.
Lethal Investments. UC leadership materially contributes to the genocide of Palestinians and the crimes of the ongoing Nakba through its financial ties to Israel and its investment in war industries, surveillance technologies, and other corporate instruments of violence. Instead of investing in its own marginalized students, its workers, and the communities of California, UC leadership has prioritized investing $18.8 billion in corporations that actively maintain systems of violence and repression in Palestine, around the world, throughout the country, and within the UC system.
Academic Complicity. Israeli universities serve as crucial pillars of Israeli settler colonialism, apartheid, and genocide. Through systemwide, campus, department, and individual research collaborations, joint funding ventures, study abroad programs, and other institutional relationships and agreements with Israeli universities, the University of California materially contributes to and facilitates genocide and the ongoing Nakba in Palestine. While UC campuses have trumpeted their role as a “global hub and international gateway partner,” UC leaders have refused to lend institutional support and resources to protect the Palestinian people, including scholars, teachers, and students, and to help sustain education and rebuild educational infrastructure.
Deadly Research. From its participation in the creation of the atomic bomb to its contemporary research collaborations with the U.S. government and its agencies—including the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the CIA and other intelligence arms—as well as the corporate war industries, UC leadership has played a central role in the creation of death-worlds around the globe, including in Gaza, where Israeli forces have relied on state-of-the-art U.S. technology and weaponry to slaughter the Palestinian people.
Violation of Healthcare Oath. The leaders of UC medical and health science centers, through both action and inaction, have violated the sacred healthcare oath to “do no harm” in the midst of a genocide that has reduced the healthcare system in Palestine to rubble. The leadership of UC’s massive health enterprise has failed to provide badly needed medical and technical assistance to the Palestinian people while disregarding urgent student, staff, and faculty calls to aid healthcare workers in Gaza who are being kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. For advocating for the sanctity of healthcare spaces and Palestinian life, UC healthcare workers and trainees have been doxxed, threatened, and disciplined, up to the point of firing.
Donor Influence. UC leadership has accepted billions of dollars from Zionist institutional and individual donors that also fund Israel’s military, Israeli-U.S. police cross-training programs, Israel’s propaganda machinery, and weapons development. Through these “gifts,” Zionist donors reap reputational benefits, which mask their investments in violence. Some of these donors fund organizations that smear, harass, and threaten UC who speak out in support of Palestinian life and against Israel’s crimes of genocide and the ongoing Nakba. UC leadership has colluded with Zionist donors to suppress and to criminalize critical study and speech about Israel’s genocide in Palestine by falsely conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
Institutionalized Zionism. UC leaders have upheld and defended Zionism, the driving ideology behind the ongoing Nakba and genocide, and perpetrated anti-Palestinian racism. In so doing, they have corroded any semblance of academic freedom and free speech in the university. By refusing to acknowledge or condemn the U.S.-backed and -funded genocide, UC leaders obscure the truth and provide institutional cover for the operations of imperial power. By rendering the university a perilous space for any critique of Zionism and normalizing the settler-colonial, apartheid, genocidal Israeli state, UC leadership contributes to the epistemological erasure and social death of the Palestinian people.
Political Repression. UC leaders have waged a campaign of suppression, persecution and intimidation, enforced through police violence, to silence political dissent. By surveilling, physically attacking, arresting, disciplining, suspending, firing, and banning students, faculty, and staff who have denounced Israel’s U.S.-backed and -funded genocide, the University of California has sought to deflect its own criminal complicity. The UC administration has banned student groups organizing for justice in Palestine, while subjecting unions, faculty, and staff to unfair and illegal labor practices. Taking their marching orders from the UC Regents, UC administrators have adopted dangerous new policies to punish free speech and deployed police and purchased military-grade weapons to quash protests on campus.
